Content warning: This chapter talks about an unplanned pregnancy. Pregnancy will also come up near the end of the chapter (never in graphic detail, and never in the context of birth). I understand if this subject is an exit point for folks dealing with similar experiences, or general aversions to the topic. If that's the case, thank you so much for reading this far. :)
In the beginning, the divine creator fashioned Mother Lada to serve as his companion and join her power with his. Once she helped him push back the devil, he cast her to the bottom of the sea where she lay forgotten for many years until he realized she was missing and called upon the light to haul her back to the surface.
Alina wonders how the years at the bottom of the ocean altered Mother Lada, compressing her bones under pressure only a god could withstand, eroding the features with which the divine creator endowed her. She wonders how long it took him to miss her and whether Mal will ever feel the same. Then as she continues to ponder these myths that mean so little to her and so much to others, she realizes that even if she has become Mother Lada, Mal will never be the divine creator, the help meet and architect of her powers.
That role belongs to the god of darkness himself.
The longer Alina sleeps by herself, the more she realizes that it wasn't the ocean that crushed Mother Lada during her isolation, but the sheer loneliness plaguing her every dream. It bleeds from Alina's dreams into every waking moment, amplified by Tamar squeezing Nadia's hand or Zoya sharing another snide remark that leaves Nikolai speechless and starry-eyed. While her friends find happiness in each other, she unravels, no bonds left to hold her together.
Loneliness teaches her to better understand the Darkling. She hates it for that. It instructs her in the ways of immortality as the world around her rushes through the seasons. It reminds her that despite how hard she tries to fit in, she'll always be alone. Which is fine, she tries to tell herself, welcome after Mal's departure that gutted her like a gaping fish. Then she remembers how the Darkling died, pleading not for relief from pain nor torment of the mind, but for her to stay by his side.
Kolyada descends, bringing pine wreaths and holly boughs and enough kvas to quench the Little Palace's thirst. It's on this, the longest night of the year, that David and Genya stand under a purple and red canopy of Fabrikator craft, clasping hands and promising each other their hearts before a small assembly of their closest friends.
They whisper ancient promises, Grisha vows that Nadia explains to Alina as the two of them clap for the couple. "To see someone's face in the making at the heart of the world is to forge a new life, just the two of you."
David's Fabrikator craftsmanship may be renowned throughout Ravka, yet as Genya's face glows when he dedicates his heart to her with those hallowed words, Alina must admit this is his finest invention yet: a love that insulates the whole party against the long night. Through the ceremony and the celebration that follows, Alina beams brightly and drinks deeply, glittering like the gold-domed roof that traps in their heat.
Once the couple slips from the party to make good on their vows, and the rest of the party disperses in trickles and spurts, the loneliness starts to twine around her lungs. The crackling logs on the hearth burn low as she slinks from the dining hall and pads to her big, empty chamber in this big, somber palace that never fit her quite right.
All of the Darkling's trappings have been discarded with his body, yet Alina sees him lurking in every shadow of her room on this sunless night. He can't really be gone, not an immortal being like him. A steel dagger couldn't undo a thousand years of immortality and the promise of a thousand more.
It's a shame, the way her heart calls for him and he doesn't respond. It's a shame that she can't stem the tide of longing she sends rushing down their bond that night, an even bigger shame that she feels small when he sends no response. He promised never to turn away from her—swore only he could understand her true nature—except here she is, teetering on the precipice of a solitary millennia without him to hold her back.
"Alexsander," she whispers.
The wind howls in reply.
Tonight the Grand Palace shimmers with silks and rubies, polished silver and gleaming teeth, coated in a champagne haze that fizzes and burbles and causes the ballroom to spin. Spring brings with it roses that cascade down the balustrades and mingle with the whirling dancers' perfumes. The whole affair leaves Alina lightheaded, so she stumbles from the party in search of fresh air.
Her feet carry her from the ivory and marble of the Grand Palace, past the dark wood and golden domes of the Little Palace, off of the stone path and into the field bordering the lake. The grass presses cool and damp against her bare feet. Somewhere along her escape from Nikolai's celebration, she lost her shoes and can't bring herself to care. Her head has stopped spinning, but the aching in her heart has taken up permanent residence.
The lake laps against the shore and the music drifts from the palace over the water, and Alina stands so still she wonders if she'll ever be able to move again. Then she feels it, at once familiar and foreign.
In the field behind the Little Palace under a spill of stars, Alina senses the distant pull of another for the first time in two years. The invisible tether she thought had fractured as the Unsea cannibalized itself vibrates insistently. Her world narrows and blurs, and snaps into focus.
Gone are the stars, the balalaika strains drifting through the balmy spring breeze, the open palace windows. All that remains is a dark room and inside, a darker silhouette. For the first time in three years, she hears the Darkling speak.
"You're growing sickly again."
After his disappearance, Alina has imagined hundreds of conversations with the Darkling, each more improbable than the last, but none quite like this. The mundaneness of his comment strikes her as funny. It could've come from Mal or Tamar just as easily as it slips from the man who wanted to rule the world.
A smile crests across her face. He tracks its progress with unchecked hunger. It's his hunger that jolts her back to herself.
Edging closer, she twists her hands in her robe to keep from reaching for him. Although he bears no tattoos proclaiming himself a blade, this man is the most deadly weapon of all. To meet him as his equal, she must shed her smile and don her claws, becoming more demon than sankta to face the devil.
"You died," she says. "I stuck a knife through your ribs." It sounds wrong, hopeful rather than vengeful.
"You called me," he says and her throat catches. She hopes he can't tell, but his eyes soften imperceptibly like they used to do just for her and he says the words that snap her in two: "I answered."
Still standing, she sags under the weight of it all: Mal's sudden departure and the Darkling's improbable reappearance. She doesn't question it, just closes her eyes and relishes how her skin prickles when he approaches.
"Careful where you step," she hisses. "I'd light you up just to watch you burn."
Were Mal close enough to hear, he'd shy away, wrinkle his nose, and study her for a hint of humor that will never come. Instead the Darkling inhales as though she's warm honey walnut cake, something potent and sweet that he can't help craving. It's the closest this man of shadows has come to lighting up, and when he smiles, Alina catches herself softening.
When he glances around her, squeezing every drop of information about her surroundings from her periphery, she does the same. It appears he's in a tent, or maybe a hut, gloom his lone companion. She wonders across how many miles their tether twists, wonders how it sprang to life again, then realizes its origins don't matter.
She's not alone any longer.
"Where are you?"
"Where you aren't."
She'll never tire of the way one of her offhand phrases snags the Darkling's attention. Again he pauses to study her like he's not quite sure what to think of her even after all this time. Like she's something rare, not just one of hundreds of Keramzin orphans, one of thousands of Grisha. Like she's radiant sunshine in this bleak midwinter and he's desperate for warmth.
The next time he asks, the weak winter sun has given way to early spring, highlighting the purple rimming his eyes. Any being who has lived as long as he must be tired. It shows in his rasping voice, in his stooping shoulders and mussed coat, in the stubble shading his jaw.
"Where are you?"
Alina's tired, too. Tired of the worried whispers that follow her around the Little Palace, of the combat that corners her when she seeks peace, of the push and pull that tethers her to this man presumed dead by most of Ravka. She contemplates telling him that she hasn't left the Little Palace, that she's trapped in a golden prison of her own devising, that it's slowly suffocating her like the White Cathedral underground and she doesn't have the heart to crawl to the surface for air.
A childish fantasy, nothing more. She won't lead a monster to Nikolai's doorstep. He has ample darkness to deal with as it is.
"Somewhere I don't want to be."
The barest bones of a clue leave the Darkling straining for more. Nevertheless she gives him nothing and he vanishes empty-handed. This is the man who infiltrated the tsar's Second Army, rising through the ranks until he commandeered the whole of it for four hundred years under a string of false identities. Alina knows better than to assume he's given up his hunt for her.
Maybe he's not hunting, a traitorous part of her mind mumbles. Maybe he's waiting. Maybe he knows you'll seek him out once you can't stand to stay by yourself.
"Where are you?" the Darkling asks a third time once the rains dry up and the clouds drift apart. Before he finishes forming the question, Alina has bid the Grand Palace farewell in her mind. She's got one hand on a knapsack and the other on the door before she answers him.
"Meet me where the water turns to gold."
He finds her in the valley of the firebird, above the waterfalls that glow scarlet at dawn. It's a long journey from the Grand Palace, made longer by traveling solo. Yet free from the memories that cloy Os Alta's air, Alina can finally breathe.
The last time Alina climbed these mountains, Tolya declared this was a holy place. Alina might have scoffed at his claim then, but as she watches a grey silhouette emerge from the mist, reverence roots her to the ground. Below, the falls batter a graveyard of bones.
He approaches her slow and careful like a trapper trying not to startle its prey. She's not so cautious, closing the gap between them by pressing one hand against his heart. It beats proof of his life into her palm. Satisfied that it's him—that he's alive, that he's near—she yanks it away like she's been scalded. He doesn't move, rare but familiar awe etched across his face.
They stand like that for a long time, for they have all the time in the world.
"Where do we go from here?" Rusty and low, the Darkling's voice gets swept away by the rushing water. Still, Alina's arms tingle at the sound.
"Anywhere."
They wander, like Mal had dreamed of doing. No armies to lead, no wars to win, just two Grisha making their way through a Ravka knitting itself together in the wake of the Darkling's destruction. They swim the True Sea bordering Os Kervo. They trawl Tsemina's bustling markets and traverse Udova's spindly red forests.
After what has felt like a lifetime of captivity from the moment he seized her in Poliznaya to the moment that she left behind the Little Palace, Alina wears their wanderings like a second skin. At first, the Darkling matches her ease. Then as the months stack up, the aimlessness starts to chafe him.
His skin thrums with the compulsion to conquer. His Morozova blood thirsts for more. Just a hasty alibi and a quick enlistment, and he could begin climbing the ranks of the Second Army all over again. A few decades' scheming and his opponents would bend, from sheer force or time's corrosive caress. Ravka could be his—the whole continent, for that matter. All he has to do is reach out and grab it.
He says as much one day as they're sipping tea in Arkesk. His face remains inscrutable; he watches her as intently as she watches him. For a few sickening seconds, Alina wonders if she'll be forced once more to breach their bond and turn the both of them into dust.
"We could have it all," he says, more a regretful surrender than a declaration of war. His grey eyes cloud, fixated on some distant dream. They lose their edges, turning from quartz into smoke. They look more human than the rest of Alexsander Morozova has appeared in centuries.
When Alina lays a hand on his forearm, he groans, a sound so small that Alina might have mistaken it for a growling stomach or passing bird had he not screwed up his face in self-irritation. They freeze; this is untraversed territory and Alina isn't certain she wants to map it. The sound cracks open some shuttered part of her heart. It splits, just a fraction, like the divine creator's golden egg.
Neither one pulls away.
"Or we could finish our tea," she says lightly and they continue to sit like that, side by side, connected by skin and merzost, fear and desire.
Slowly they wear each other's edges smooth. When he rages, a thin beam of light guides him back to her. When she despairs, he wraps her in a black cloak that smells of pine and winter winds, smoke and gold.
This act of erosion allows them to establish a tentative but true peace in each other's company. As Ravka's memory blurs them into myth, they find freedom in anonymity. They move across the country as if cloaked by the Darkling's shadows.
Worship for Sankta Alina spreads as scorching as the barren wasteland where the Fold once roiled. Supplicants pray, brand themselves with suns, and fashion bone collars that proclaim their devotion to the woman who healed their nation. It makes Alina uncomfortable in ways she can't quite name, yet it grants her the freedom to wander with her neck bared, no scarf needed to hide the collar the Darkling gave her.
He takes a twisted kind of pleasure in the supplications that Sankta Alina receives. Then again, he's always been drawn to power. Once Alina hears tell of a jittery young priest who dons black and devotes his life to canonizing a new saint, she flings the tales at the Darkling, retribution for all the times he mocked her Soldat Sol.
"The Starless Saint," she says when he joins her by a brook trickling across some far flung tract of Ivets. "That's what they're calling you now. The patron saint of those who seek salvation in the dark."
Water cascades over stones, teases her toes, and almost drowns out his reply, although it does nothing to conceal how his gaze flickers across her body. She gave up the kefta after the Fold collapsed, a symbol of everything that wielding the sun had cost her. Yet for the first time in years, she finds herself longing to disappear within its whisper-soft folds. Without yards of wool to hide underneath, she feels far too exposed by his ravenous stare.
"And you, the patron saint of undiscovered gifts. Sankta Alina of the Fold." In his mouth, he hones her title to Grisha steel in his mouth and caresses her name like a prayer. "What undiscovered gifts I could help you uncover if you let me."
For the first time in years, she contemplates what brutal salvation she might eke from his body should they join. Although they sit mere inches apart, their connection prickles, urging Alina toward a destiny she once thought inevitable and later unbearable. Now the same destiny wears down her doubts like the river lapping at her feet, gentle and warm.
As the temptation rises to embrace what he offers her, regardless of the price, habit guides her to protest: "I don't want them."
"You don't want them." His subtle sneer takes her by surprise after months of harmony. It strips away the years she's spent growing into her power and transforms her into a quaking girl wearing borrowed robes in a carriage the color of night. "Grisha across the continent would bleed themselves dry to possess your gifts and you don't want them? You'd rather deny yourself of what you want than claim what could be yours. You may be a saint, but you're no martyr."
When the Darkling's hand darts out to grasp her own, Alina can't conceal a shiver. His grin tightens, wolf-sharp. Their bond vibrates in time with her heart. She can feel his, too, a reminder that he never really died, that beings like them never really can.
In that moment, warm water kissing her ankles and his pulse kissing her palm, Alina sees her resistance for what it is: an exercise in futility that will end in a solar flare or maybe that soft violet twilight which descends when sun and shadow meet. They're going to live forever, the Sun Summoner and her Starless Saint. It's only a matter of time until they collide.
It's only a matter of time until Alina's resistance snaps.
The Darkling ghosts his fingers along her wrist, a blazing trail that betrays the sliver of sun that Alina sunk into his skin in the depths of the shadowed chapel. It speaks of wanting and waiting, an eternal craving driven by an eternal understanding and tempered by eternal patience wearing thin.
His touch is snow and steel, like wet boots soaked through no matter how hard Alina tries to keep her feet dry. Now the river has drenched her feet; she's giving into the water and letting it sweep her away. In the river's flow, she feels Mother Lada urging her on, whispering that using merzost to generate something new requires more unraveling than making.
Alina leans in until her lips brush the shell of the Darkling's ear. His hair smells clean like snow. "I'm no saint."
This time when his eyes flash black with wanting, Alina doesn't turn away.
On the longest day of the year, when the sun claims the darkness for its own, Alina claims the Darkling as her own for the first time. Before his betrayal, she imagined smooth, cool fingertips chasing his pleasure in hers, coaxing what he could from her and capturing what he could not, his ministrations both intimidating and electrifying in the face of her inexperience. After she escaped from him for the second time, she dreamt of roughness driving her into the sheets, yanking screams from her skin. On the longest day of the year, she finds that cold fire burns all the same.
Never had she imagined the interplay between light and dark, blinding brightness and bottomless shadows. Their keftas pool, gold and black at the foot of her bed. Their limbs intertwine, he reaches for her thighs, she shies from his gentle strokes because she's not sure they're really his and not a product of her most private dreams.
With every brush of his tongue, he reassures her this is real. She comes apart with a whimper that sounds like his name. He slips into her with an unpracticed tenderness that makes Alina ache. Outside, darkness falls, but inside, their bodies generate heat.
So this is the making at the heart of the world.
This merzost, this act of worshipful creation, sets her skin ablaze and imprints stars on the backs of her eyelids. Terrifying, limitless, it awakens a yawning hunger inside Alina. Even as her lips feast on his, she wonders if they'll ever sate it. Even as they fall in a boneless heap—his body curling around hers as a reminder that she'll never be alone, not with him by her side—she hopes they never do.
The Darkling's declaration from years ago revisits Alina in a dream: There are no others like us. And there never will be. She wakes with aching breasts and a roiling stomach. When her cycle arrives late, and then not at all, the Sun Summoner rediscovers that even the Darkling can be proved wrong.
From what little Grisha training she received, she recalls Baghra's warnings that merzost is an abomination, that it requires the kind of sacrifice which consumes its wielder in equal measure. The child growing inside her womb exacts its own price: sleepless nights, queasy mornings, and unbidden radiance limning her belly as it expands.
She resorts to concealing the glow with limp wool dresses and thick woolen scarves, Baghra made anew. The Darkling's mother takes up residence in a corner of her mind, perhaps because Alina has no mother of her own to guide her through this. When nausea propels Alina to her knees, she hears Baghra screeching at her to stand. When she lies awake next to the Darkling, too hot to sleep, she remembers Baghra's sweltering search for warmth and braces herself against the heat. When the child kicks her ribs hard enough to bruise, the Baghra inside her brain chides her for spending all her strength fighting her true nature.
Her power may have been divided on the Fold, but Alina is a creator through and through. Her rounding belly testifies of that. Soon it demands that she tell the Darkling, else it will show him the fruits of their union.
In the beginning, the divine creator divided the light from the darkness, or so the Apparat used to claim. But what will remain when light and darkness merge once again? Maybe their mingling is inevitable, entropy running its course. Maybe it will divide asunder their world. Maybe it will bind them together, a raft bobbing on an endless sea.
She tells him as dusk descends on Ryevost, dyeing the river purple and pink. The water's colder here than Ivets, glacier runoff that chills her feet long after she lays them on the grass to dry. A fire sputters nearby to ward off the crisp autumn breeze.
"Alexsander," she says because she doesn't know what else to say. Guiding his hand to her stomach is easier than explaining their making that unmakes him when he touches it.
Reading him has always required guesswork. Tonight is no exception. His flinty eyes widen, then narrow, his mouth curving as it does when he examines her like a puzzle whose pieces don't quite fit.
"Our child."
A statement rather than a question, but Alina nods just the same.
"You're shaking."
Another nod, then she gives voice to the fear plaguing her since the day her cycle dried. "Now that you've seen what we have made, will you turn away?"
Although he remains frozen, the fire jumps, sending shadows skittering across the meadow. Then he drops to his knees and collects her hands in his. "A thousand years alone, and you have changed that in an instant. Moi luch, I will never turn away."
They stay like that for what may well be an eternity.
"My power is yours," he whispers, an echo of their embrace in a dank chapel a thousand miles away. Their connection shudders to life. A foreign joy amplifies Alina's emotions, stoking her excitement and crowding out her fear. It feels like the Fold collapsing in on itself, dissolving under the power of a thousand sunbeams.
"And yours is mine." It tastes like crisp winter wind and feels like a vow, more binding than an heirloom emerald or one night spent in an orchard at the end of the world. When he coaxes her above the stars, his fingers a flying machine that makes her stomach drop, she murmurs his name like a prayer until her heels kiss the ground.
"You're glowing," he marvels, tracing ancient wards on her stomach, the meaning of which Alina doesn't know so much as feel.
Once she drags her eyes open, a faint gold shimmer greets her and she can't hold back her smile. "You are, too."
If only the cultists could see it—the Starless Saint's skin faintly luminescent in every place it collides with the Sun Summoner. Shadows wreathe the both of them, kissing every spot where Alina's light won't touch.
"So I am," Alexsander murmurs. "So I am."
Later he replaces Nikolai's emerald ring with an onyx band that sops up light and spits back darkness. He gives Alina his nights and his shadows and a daughter with a shock of black hair. She trades her surname for his, one saint for another.
They settle across the ocean, Ravka proving too great a burden for both of them to bear. They construct a cottage big enough for the three of them and watch their daughter grow. She sprouts fast like beets and smart like a whip. One morning when she bends the wind to her will, her parents marvel at the balance she brings their union. In time, the girl learns to blow away the shadows and pull clouds over the sun. In time, Alina and Alexsander lay claim to that elusive peace.
Sometimes his craving for power intensifies and sometimes her urge to run swells like waves on an empty sea. Sometimes all they can do is cling to the fragile life they've cultivated. Sometimes Alina wonders if it's enough.
Then one morning, she wakes to find him whispering into her hair, "I have seen your face in the making at the heart of the world."
From the next room, their daughter giggles.
It's then that Alina's world is reborn, a world where she lives not as Grisha nor saint, but as a creator hand in hand with two of her kind.
Thanks for your kudos and kind comments which encouraged me to shirk work and finish this story before binging the show! Let me know what you thought of the show—Jessie Mei Li's performance blew me away and I'm down to gush about it any day. :)